D&D - Campaign Musings

EDIT: I have decided to run a D&D game set in the rather sketchy world hinted at in the PHB and supported in most modules. Please see Documents->Darkwylde in the navigation menu for rules and guidelines.

As I inch closer toward running my first 4th Ed. D&D campaign (just D&D, hereafter), I've been giving a lot of thought to the source material. My strength as a GM is in roleplaying NPCs and world building, or so I flatter myself. This has led me to run primarily my own worlds. Over the last several years I've drifted away from that and run Arcana Evolved and Forgotten Realms, using their worlds with original content of my own devising. Now I'm at the point where I want to write a fantasy novel, possibly with a D&D tie-in, and making my own world for that effort has a lot of good synergies.

However, D&D has been geared toward the production and selling of content, both through modules and through the Dragon and Dungeon Webzines. This is a bent I've been espousing for RPG companies for decades, but it creates some problems for me. It is much more work than in the past to craft your own monsters and classes. The commercial modules come with dungeon tiles, beautiful maps, monster "blocks", and very well thought out (and thus balanced) encounters, all of which will require a great deal of effort on my part to reproduce. That pushes me toward running modules as my time for generating game content is limited.

At this point I'm torn between running D&D in a canon world (Forgotten Realms or Eberron), or creating my own. Either way, I'll likely use existing modules and adapt the plot lines and backgrounds as much as needed to fit my campaign. That's definitely laziness talking though... starting from scratch has some real appeal for me and fits in better with my book efforts, as I've decided the Forgotten Realms is not a setting I care to explore as an author. Too eclectic for my tastes.

In thinking about an "original" world, I've come down to two possibilities.

For years I ran a Rolemaster campaign set in the Azeryani Empire, an old and highly advanced society more like Renaissance Europe than Dark Ages, with enemies on all sides but currently at the top of the world. The culture had more than a bit of Persian bent, with a good deal of Roman thrown in, and societal and cultural tensions were a common theme of the campaign. The ability to use magic is born into only a few, and they are hated and distrusted by most non-mages. Choosing this setting will tend to emphasize socio-political interactions and more "civilized" engagements, rather than exploring untrammeled wilderness.

The second option is in what is essentially a post-apocalyptic Earth. The cataclysm that destroyed the civilizations that came before is psychic or magical in nature, and the planet now occupies another dimension in which magical realities commonly intersect with the physical. Most of the natural world is super-charged with these magical energies, and carries an enhanced sentience and wild power. The campaign would be set in a society which was partially protected from the ravages of the cataclysm. They have lost all history from outside their boundaries after being protected for many centuries and now the barrier that protects them is beginning to break down. All individuals have some magical ability, although they don't think of it in that manner. Strong emotions, events, age, and will all draw magical energies into a person, object or place. The effect is a bit like Middle-Earth or Patricia McKillkip's Riddlemaster series in that there are magical qualities about many things that simply make them more of what they already are. This latter setting would be much more raw, with the players operating with greater isolation and usually facing the unknown in unexplored wilderness.

I am quite interested in the inputs of anyone who cares to chime in, but especially those who think they might play.